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**AUGUST 14, 2023**

On the Prospect website

* David Dayen & Maureen Tkacik on the Sackler family's bid for legal
immunity
<[link removed]>
in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy

* Ryan Cooper on Ron DeSantis's threat to attack Mexico
<[link removed]>

* Harold Meyerson on the economic repercussions of delinking from China
<[link removed]>


Kuttner on TAP

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**** Will Biden Have Enough Chips in 2024?

His industrial-policy programs are great. How much of an election year
difference can they make?

Joe Biden in many ways is the most progressive Democratic president
since FDR. He has resurrected national economic planning as a necessary
government function and scrapped the neoliberal myth that government
should not try to pick winners.

But there are two huge differences between Biden and Roosevelt, and
neither is Biden's fault. First, FDR had immense working Democratic
majorities in both houses of Congress, and Biden has fumes. Second, FDR
had World War II.

In the war buildup, unemployment melted away from over 13 percent in
1940 to effectively zero by early 1942. During the war years, real wages
grew by half. Government spent about 30 percent of GDP on the war effort
and the related recapitalization of U.S. industry.

Biden's big public programs, including the CHIPS and Science Act,
Inflation Reduction Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure law together
spend about $2 trillion over ten years
<[link removed]>-about
1 percent of GDP. If you compare the relative scale, as well as the
longer lead time of Biden's public investments, you can appreciate why
Biden does not get the credit he deserves.

Reviewing Biden's overall economic performance in the pandemic and
related recession and recovery, he's done just about everything right.
Unemployment is at record lows, job creation is at record highs, real
wages are (modestly) up, inflation has subsided. Biden has attempted
other more immediate and vivid sources of help, such as student debt
relief or a permanent child allowance, but has been blocked by Congress
or the courts.

The White House fact sheet on CHIPS, released August 8, tells us: "In
the one year since CHIPS was signed into law, companies have announced
over $166 billion in manufacturing in semiconductors and electronics,
and at least 50 community colleges in 19 states have announced new or
expanded programming to help American workers access good-paying jobs in
the semiconductor industry."

Great stuff, but not a huge number of new, well-paying jobs in the near
term. The Semiconductor Industry Association projects that the industry
will be short just 67,000 workers by 2030.

However, as Ronnie Chatterji, who recently stepped down as White House
coordinator for the CHIPS and Science program, points out, these new
publicly subsidized investments do make a concentrated difference, with
high local media visibility, in some states and regions.

These include Ohio, where Intel has broken ground for a massive new
campus and several thousand new jobs, and upstate New York, where Micron
will invest billions. Other key places with large new semiconductor
investments are Arizona and Indiana.

Many of these happen to be swing states or swing districts. The other
local good-news story here is the several hundred million in new funding
for community colleges to increase training of a workforce for new tech
jobs.

The challenge, beyond election year visibility, is that the
administration has only so much leverage. These are global companies
that can produce anywhere in the world; they have never had union
production workforces.

That said, the Biden semiconductor program is a genuine achievement that
will revive a key domestic industry and relieve supply chain pressures,
as well as a monumental ideological reversal. The political question is
whether it's sufficient, even with the best messaging in the word, to
overcome the long-term sense of government having failed to deliver for
working-class voters who face worsening terms of engagement with the
economy. Only a relative few will get these new tech jobs.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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[link removed]

An Unlikely Twist in Corporate Accountability
<[link removed]>

The Sacklers might actually get their legal immunity stripped, by the
Supreme Court of all people. BY DAVID DAYEN & MAUREEN TKACIK

Ron DeSantis Proposes Unprovoked War on Mexico
<[link removed]>

He's the latest of many Republican imperialists to endorse another war
of aggression. BY RYAN COOPER

Delinking From China Doesn't Mean U.S. Workers Will Benefit
<[link removed]>
Not if our corporations produce their goods in countries with lower
wages than the Chinese. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

 

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